


As the Day Breaks

by kaljara



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bisexual Lance (Voltron), Black Paladin Lance (Voltron), But mostly angst, Canon Compliant (Mostly), Cuban Lance (Voltron), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gay Keith (Voltron), Keith and Shiro are Adoptive Siblings, Korean Keith (Voltron), M/M, Minor character death (OC), Nonbinary Pidge | Katie Holt, Rebel forces, Self-Discovery, Slow Burn, Trauma, Unsolved Murder, co-leadership klance, diplomatic missions, loss is the main theme, post-season 2 story, pre-series prologue, they/them pronouns for Pidge
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 05:50:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10938288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaljara/pseuds/kaljara
Summary: When Keith and Lance were at the Garrison, they were connected by more than just their rivalry---they were both good friends of Elsie Kanerva, a fighter class pilot whose skills and charm were only comparable to Takashi Shirogane. But when Elsie died in a botched flight simulation incident less than a month after the Kerberos mission failure was announced, both of the boys were left reeling. Lance believed that Elsie's death was a tragic accident, but Keith wasn't convinced, claiming that Elsie was murdered in an attempted cover-up. From their disagreement, resentment bloomed and persisted, straining their relationship even as they became paladins of Voltron.Now Shiro is gone again, and both Lance and Keith must face their differences in order to lead Voltron. That's easier said than done. As Prince Lotor's forces grow in strength, Voltron struggles to form alliances while continuing to search for Shiro and the rebels linked to his disappearance. And as daunting new information comes to light, Lance and Keith unravel a cover-up that will alter the universe and make them question everything they thought they knew about those they have sworn to protect.





	As the Day Breaks

**Author's Note:**

> For Marylou, who loves Voltron as much as I do. She requested angst and tragedy, so I delivered.

AS IT WAS

LOCATION: The Galaxy Garrison base near Albuquerque, New Mexico  
TIME: 1900 hours  
DATE: 3 weeks and 2 days after the members of the Kerberos mission were pronounced dead

 

Lance was the last one they spoke to when they recovered the body. He shouldn’t have been surprised---not really. He didn’t have the sort of clearance required to gain entrance to the scene. He was a cadet in his junior year, and a cargo pilot, at that. If there was one thing the Garrison was adamant about, it was keeping its power structure and chain of command rigid, unyielding even in emotional situations. _To keep panic and discord from occurring _, the officers had told him gently, their eyes sympathetic.__  
  
“There was…an accident during a training simulation, Cadet Mendoza,” an unfamiliar blond woman told Lance again, her eyes trained on the polished linoleum under her equally-as-polished black boots. Her words weren’t registering. She wouldn’t even look him in the eye, but instead stared pleadingly at her partner. The man at her side was huge, a hulking form made mostly of muscle. _Yates _, his name tag read. It was the only thing Lance could truly process. He peered around Yates and looked down the long, blisteringly white hallway to see a group of cadets staring back at him. There were guards blocking their entrance to the hallway, but even from this distance, Lance could see that many of the cadets were crying. “Commander Iverson wanted us to come and collect you,” the blond woman went on. She finally looked up, her blue eyes catching Lance’s own. “You see, Cadet Elisabet Kanerva…I’m sorry to say, but she didn’t make it.”__  
  
No, that couldn’t be right. He had seen her not even an hour ago, and she hadn’t mentioned anything about a training sim. She would have told him, especially if she was going to log time for training after hours. She would have invited him to come. Elsie was like that---all smiles and fond exasperation, telling him to be on his A game if he didn’t want his ass beat by the sim. She was fine---she had to be. There had to be some misunderstanding. Maybe they misidentified the body? After all, there was a sophomore girl, Bridget Something-or-another, and she looked like she could be Elsie’s _sister _, so really there was a possibility that they were wrong, there was a possibility that she was _alive _\---Lance watched as the world tilted strangely on its axis, spinning in a kaleidoscope of colors as he tried to blink his vision clear. His long fingers wiped away the moisture gathering in his eyes, but he could barely fathom the tears. There was no use in crying, because Elsie was fine.____  
  
Lance would go see her, knock on her dorm door and put this whole thing behind him. She would open it with flourish, awarding him with one of her crooked smiles, her nose scrunching in pleasant surprise. They would laugh about this, curling up on her bed as she painted their toenails and ranted about the other fighter class hotshots below her in rank.  
  
The blond officer put her hand on his shoulder. “Lance, we can take you to see her. Her parents were called immediately after the incident and it was upon their request that she remains with friends until they can get her.” Lance shuddered. Elsie’s parents lived all the way in Boston. Surely the Garrison should have properly identified the body before they called the girl’s parents and asked them to come to New Mexico?  
  
“Holloway,” Officer Yates sighed, pursing his lips. “He’s in shock. Let’s get him to the infirmary.” His partner nodded hesitantly, walking down the hallway to signal the guards to part the crowd. Yates placed his hand on Lance’s back and nudged him forward. Lance stumbled slightly on his gangly legs and then righted himself, swallowing hard. His head was spinning, making it hard to focus on anything but the ground underneath his feet.  
  
_There’s no reason to be upset _, Lance kept telling himself. There had to have been some mistake. Lance wanted Hunk here---he knew that his best friend would offer him a comforting hug and a reassuring smile. Hell, he would even settle for their newbie teammate, Pidge Gunderson, who would meticulously list off every reason why Elsie being… _gone _was impossible.____  
  
Lance followed Holloway closely, Yates’s hand firm on his back as he steered Lance through the crowd of cadets. One of the boys, a redhead fighter pilot they called Monty, lowered his eyes as Lance sidled by him. His face was contorted in pain. Monty was one of the cadets that always accompanied Elsie during her sims. Lance refused to look back at Monty as the officers lead him down the seemingly endless hallway to the infirmary. Their footsteps echoed like gunshots, drowning out the indecipherable whispers. The place was swarmed by students and staff alike. They were a sea of sleek gray and obtrusive orange, most of them standing outside the door, wringing their hands in teary disbelief.  
  
Holloway and Yates stopped outside the metallic door, doing an about face on either side of the doorway. Lance stood there for a moment, completely undone. The fluorescent lights above turned his brown skin an ashy gray. His reflection in the door in front of him was distorted, a blurry caricature of his sharp features and long limbs. Lance took in one deep breath, and then another, the sound of his heart pounding the only noise in the hallway. Everyone else had gone silent in grim anticipation.  
  
Lance pressed his hand against the scanner, watching as the neon blue light identified his hand print. The door hissed open a second later. It felt like he was entering a morgue instead of the infirmary. The air was stale---it was too warm in the room. Lance noticed that immediately. The door closed behind him with finality and Lance found himself standing face to face with Commander Iverson. The man had always intimidated Lance. He was broad-shouldered and as prickly as a cactus, giving new meaning to the term ‘no-nonsense’. Lance had never seen him smile, come to think of it. He wasn’t wearing his normal scowl right now, though, and that unsettled Lance more than anything else. Iverson’s face was perfectly blank, a mask of indifference.  
  
Lance drank in the infirmary to avoid Iverson’s invasive stare. There were a few plastic chairs in the far corner, along with a couple of decorative house plants that reached their leafy fingers toward the ceiling. The room was the color of the sand, the walls plastered with STI posters and disease information. He hadn’t been here since he had the flu last school year.  
  
Iverson was blocking his view of the examination table, but Lance could still see a foot covered by a white sheet. His stomach flipped sickeningly. Commander Iverson squinted at Lance before he said gruffly: “Well, I’ll leave you to it, Mendoza. You have ten minutes to say your goodbyes, and then the Garrison is required to transfer Miss Kanerva’s body to a proper storage location.” Iverson gave a stiff nod before hastily retreating.  
  
Lance was startled when he realized that he wasn’t the only one left in the room. Sitting in a folding chair that was wedged behind the examination table was another boy. His hands were buried in his dark hair, his elbows propped up on his knees. For once, he was actually still in his cadet garb, the Garrison’s signature orange-and-white uniform bright in the dim lighting of the infirmary. Lance’s breath immediately seized in his chest when Keith Jeung looked up, his red-rimmed eyes hazy. “Didn’t think they were ever going to find you,” he rasped, his hands falling limply to his sides. “They looked for nearly half an hour.”  
  
Lance took a tentative step forward, dread making his feet leaden. He and Keith didn’t really know each other---they knew of one another through Elsie, who had somehow befriended the both of them during their first year at the Garrison. Keith Jeung was one of the best fighter pilots that the Garrison had ever produced, and he was constantly neck-and-neck with Elsie, playfully fighting for the title of the top ranking fighter pilot. Lance, on the other hand, had been trying to claw his way up the ladder since his freshman year, and Elsie had taken him under her wing with ease. She had tried to push Lance and Keith together on multiple occasions, but all attempts at civility had crashed and burned. Mostly because Keith was a cold, pretentious asshole with no interest in befriending someone so far beneath his abilities. At least, that’s what he had told Lance one night last year when Lance demanded to know what his problem was.  
  
Since then, Lance had kept his distance from Keith. Lance had never understood what Elsie saw in the guy, but he supposed she just felt bad for Keith. He didn’t have any other friends, unless you counted Takashi Shirogane, though he had been more of a mentor than anything else. But five months ago, Shiro, along with Sam and Matt Holt, had left for the Kerberos mission, which the Garrison had recently deemed a grievous loss after announcing their deaths. Keith had never been the same, and neither had Elsie. There had been a weight on her shoulders recently that hadn’t existed before.  
  
Lance stared at Keith, and Keith stared right back, unwavering. He finally jerked his chin to the white sheet. Keith’s eyelashes were wet with tears when he finally choked: “She just looks like…she’s sleeping. Like she’ll wake up any second.” Lance traced his fingers across the metal of the examination table, and then he pulled back the corner of the sheet. His hands shook so badly that the sheet slid out of his grasp and to the floor with a whisper.  
  
Lance was rooted to the spot where he stood. Because as much as he wanted to deny it, as much as his anxiety demanded him to look anywhere and everywhere but the body lying in front of him, he had known as soon as he saw Keith sitting in the corner. Keith would not have come for just anyone.  
  
Elsie’s golden curls were free around her face, not confined by her typical ponytail. Her lashes cast crescent shadows across her freckle-dusted cheeks. Lance dragged his thumb gently down her jaw, trembling. Elsie’s skin was paler than usual, but it was the drying blood caked on her neck and clavicle that made her parlor stand out in stark relief. She was wearing nothing but a white slip---the medic must have removed her uniform to view the damage to the lower half of her body. Lance choked back bile as he looked at the mangled, bruised and bloody mess that were Elsie’s legs. Her torso didn’t look quite right, either. It was slightly distorted, but Lance’s vision was so blurred that he couldn’t quite pin what was wrong. “They said there was a malfunction with the impact sensor---it shook the craft so violently that the control panel dislodged and folded in on itself. It---it broke her legs and her ribs,” Keith said softly. “Her lungs were punctured. I found her like that---underneath the metal. I yelled for help but…she was gone. She was already gone.”  
  
Lance couldn’t look away from Elsie’s unresponsive face. Tears slid down his cheeks and landed on the examination table without a sound. It wasn’t until he took her limp hand into his own that he truly began to sob. Without shame, Lance brought Elsie’s blood-crusted hand to his chest and held it against his heart as he cried. She was really gone, lost forever to a place beyond his reach. He had just seen her a little over an _hour ago _. They’d had dinner together. Elsie had discussed quantum physics with Pidge, only to switch to some engineering jumbo when Hunk sat down with his tray of food. Lance had teasingly thrown pieces of his roll at her, which resulted in Elsie threatening to pour her chocolate milk on him again. They had all laughed until they couldn’t breathe when Lance made a joke about the grumpy demeanor of one of their professors.__  
  
She had been _alive _, so alive, green eyes shining with mirth when she told him that she was going to go check on Keith before she went back to her dorm room for the night. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Mendoza!” she had called over her shoulder with a smirk, jogging down the corridor, her blond curls bouncing as she went. Lance had gone up to the roof, sneaking past the guards just so he could lay down and stargaze. Holloway and Yates had found him slipping back into the building not long afterward.__  
  
And now he was here, trapped in that terrible moment of death and despair, with the knowledge that Elsie Kanerva would never again open her eyes, or smile, or tease Lance, or speak fondly of Keith, or turn eighteen.  
  
“It wasn’t an accident,” Keith murmured, and Lance jerked upright like someone had electrocuted him. He didn’t let go of Elsie’s hand, though his grip went slack momentarily. Keith paced the length of the tiled floor, worrying his lip between his teeth.  
  
“What the hell are you talking about?” Lance croaked.  
  
Keith shook his head, running his fingers through his hair anxiously. “This wasn’t an accident, Lance. There’s no way that the control panel could have come loose---it’s bolted into the simulator. Even if the impact sensor was damaged, the force of the blow could have injured Elsie, but it wouldn’t have killed her. It couldn’t have.” Keith’s eyes were too bright, full of hysteria and an energy he typically reserved for training. “Someone must have tampered with the machinery!” Keith exclaimed, gesturing jerkily to the infirmary door. “I mean, they had the opportunity! They won’t continue to look for Shiro and the Holts, and they claim that they’re dead, but _I know _that’s a lie! Shiro is the best pilot the Garrison has ever had, and the Holts are geniuses. There is no way in hell that they---that there was a pilot error! Everything was fine until it wasn’t.” Keith stopped pacing and gave Lance a wild look. “Elsie was looking into their disappearance with me, and maybe she…maybe she stumbled across something, you know, and the Garrison found out about it and…” Keith’s voice was rising in pitch, but Lance was done. “They covered up the Kerberos mission, and now they’re covering up---“__  
  
“Can you just stop?! Lance yelled, finally dropping Elsie’s hand. His whole body was thrumming with anger and pain. Keith stared at him in shock, his gray eyes going wide. “She’s gone, Keith! She’s dead, and you keep on ranting about a cover up because you can’t let _anything _go! There’s not always a bigger picture,” Lance spat, tears pricking in his eyes yet again. “Sometimes bad shit happens for no fucking reason and it’s no one’s fault, okay? Sometimes life just says _fuck you _and it takes and it takes until you have nothing left.” Lance’s chest heaved. “You don’t get to---to make up some far-fetched story about a cover up and dishonor her memory just so you c-can feel better! You don’t get to pat yourself on the back. The Holts are dead, and so is Shiro, and so is Elsie!”____  
  
Keith grabbed the lapels of Lance’s uniform and slammed him against the wall, his expression a mixture of hurt and anger. The certification plaque above Lance’s head wobbled precariously upon impact. Lance’s back protested, sending a jolt from his spine to the tips of his toes. Keith’s nose was an inch away from his. Lance could see every one of his impossibly long lashes. “You don’t know a damn thing about what I’ve done and what I know. This whole thing is going to come crashing down around your ears, Mendoza, and then you’ll regret not listening.” Keith grit his teeth. “She meant more to me than some cheap lie.”  
  
Lance pushed Keith’s hands away, feeling suddenly drained. He wanted to go to sleep for ten thousand years. “You may have been friends with Elsie, but we’re not friends, okay? I don’t owe you my time, or my kindness, or _anything _.” Keith crossed his arms over his chest and looked away. “Until you can let her memory rest in peace, you can forget my name. I’m not going to help you on your quest to getting yourself arrested or whatever the hell you plan to do.” Lance whirled around and stormed to the door. He paused and looked over his shoulder at Keith, anger still boiling in his blood. “I’m coming for your title, Mullet. You didn’t deserve to compete with her. You’re treating Elsie like she’s just some puzzle piece in your conspiracy theory, but I know better.” Lance’s eyes trailed over to Elsie for one final time. She lay there, eerily still---but Lance could see her in his mind’s eye as she had once been---vivacious and fearless and lovely, smiling so wide that her eyes squeezed shut and laughing at all the inappropriate moments.__  
  
That was all he needed.  
  
Lance pressed his palm against the scanner and slipped out of the infirmary, loss pulsing inside of him like a second heartbeat.


End file.
